Lee County lawmakers on state budget: ‘Our environment is taken care of’
FORT MYERS, Fla. (FLV) – Members of the Lee County Legislative Delegation thanked Gov. Ron DeSantis and the legislature for providing millions of dollars for water quality and hurricane recovery efforts.
Reps. Jenna Persons-Mulicka, R-Fort Myers, Spencer Roach, R-North Fort Myers, Tiffany Esposito, R-Fort Myers, and Sen. Jonathan Martin, R-Fort Myers, spoke at a Friday press conference.
“The ‘Framework for Freedom’ budget allocates hundreds of millions of dollars of needed funds to be invested in important projects in Lee County from hurricane recovery to infrastructure and resiliency to water quality and numerous community initiatives,” Persons-Mulicka said.
She listed allocations including $350 million for a hurricane recovery grant program as well as dollars for specific Fort Myers, Bonita, Cape Coral and Fort Myers Beach projects.
“These projects fund items from repairs to roads and bridges, to beach erosion projects to repairs to our schools,” Persons-Mulicka said. “As we continue to recover and rebuild and look forward to a better and greater future, we know how critical it is that we focus on our infrastructure needs.”
Southwest Florida is still recovering following near-Category 5 Hurricane that slammed into the coast.
“So it’s been 268 days. 268 days since Ian made landfall,” Roach said Friday. “Many of my constituents are still out of their homes but what this community has is grit. And I just can’t say enough about the team concept this delegation has embraced to work with their local partners.”
Martin praised southwest Florida leaders for working to obtain “every last penny” to help recover from Hurricane Ian.
“We didn’t just get funding for hurricane recovery for resiliency, but we also had a seat at the table and had an opportunity to get to have our case heard for other projects that were then funded in this budget,” Martin said.
Martin said $694 million has been allocated for Everglades restoration projects.
About $356 million will go toward the comprehensive Everglades restoration plan, $64 million for the EAA reservoir, $50 million for reducing discharges to Caloosahatchee and St. Lucie estuaries in the watershed restoration project, and $96 million for the northern Everglades and estuaries program.
“Our environment is important to every component of our lives here in southwest Florida,” Martin said. “To our personal lives, to tourism, to business, to development, but most importantly for the quality of our lives.”
The budget includes $125 million toward water infrastructure projects in the Caloosahatchee and St. Lucie Basins, which the lawmakers said would ease the cost of building modern wastewater and stormwater infrastructure to prevent against red tide and harmful blue-green algae blooms.
“This money will be used to upgrade wastewater treatment facilities for septic to sewer conversions,” Esposito said. “We also know that the best way to minimize harmful algae blooms is to stop feeding them.”
Esposito explained that the state investments would help build modern water infrastructure without homeowners and business owners being left to “bear that cost.”
